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[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

via: giandujakiss

Remember this?

The article goes on to account how, in 1997, Greenspan got into a spat with the ead of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She wanted to regulate derivatives; he didn't. Greenspan joined forces with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy, Lawrence Summers, to resist her plan.

“Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis,” said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. “Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.”

“All of the forces in the system were arrayed against it,” [Rubin] said. “The industry certainly didn’t want any increase in these requirements. There was no potential for mobilizing public opinion.”

Well then. Deja Vu!

And what do we find Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary, RUBIN's PROTEGE Tim Geithner, doing...

Oh dang! Rumor has it that Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary-to-be, does not care for our beloved Sheila Bair and her maverick ways. Bair is the chairman of the FDIC and one of the few high-profile Bush administration appointees to very repeatedly and publicly bang the drum about how if our financial crisis is ultimately due to people’s mortgages going south, maybe we ought to work on fixing those bad mortgages. She’s a working class hero! So naturally, Giethner hates her guts. The problem is that she isn’t a “team player” or a huge fan of Citigroup, and for this she must be banished forever from Washington:

Geithner became increasingly wary of Bair as she worked with the other regulatory agencies on emergency bailouts of banks in recent months. The New York fed chief has been concerned that Bair was more worried about keeping the FDIC’s insurance program protected than she was about the entire financial system, one person said.
Bair twice sparred with her colleagues at the Fed and Treasury over efforts involving Citigroup. In October, she acquiesced to Wachovia Corp.’s agreement to a takeover by Wells Fargo & Co. days after agreeing to back an initial deal with Citigroup. … Wells Fargo offered about $15 billion for Wachovia, compared with Citigroup’s $2.2 billion deal to acquire Wachovia’s banking operations, and didn’t need any FDIC aid.MORE

Speaking of Rubin:

Our economic terminators

Last week, the New York Times penned a paean to Citigroup executive Bob Rubin, gushing about how amazingly wonderful his power and influence is inside the Democratic Party, and noting that the incoming Obama administration is heavily influenced both by the man himself and his disciples. This, despite the fact that most of the policies Rubin and Rubinites are known for have been intimately involved in the current economic mess. What was amazing about this story was not that Rubin and his intellectual offspring remain credible voices in the political system. That's no surprise in a country where Iraq War proponents are regularly billed in the media and treated by both parties as more Serious and Pragmatic than those who opposed the war. No, what was shocking was that the reality the Times presented still persists even as Rubin heads a bank at the center of the current crisis. In other words, not only has the guy been proven wrong on policy, he's actually intimately intertwined in one of the largest corporations at the center of this scandalous meltdown - and yet retains his "star power," as the newspaper called it.
Now, the question is whether he can retain that "star power" and influence with the incoming administration in light of this new report:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An investor lawsuit contends that Citigroup Inc insiders, including senior counselor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, sold more than $150 million of their own shares at inflated prices while concealing the bank's true financial health... The shareholders contend that Rubin, former Chief Executive Charles Prince and other current and former executives engaged in "suspicious" stock sales that were "made at times calculated to maximize the personal benefits from undisclosed inside information."

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